The Boeing Quality Control system is quite detailed and complex, and involves a dance involving the machinists, the engineers, and management. The process has worked well over the years, and I know my fellow retirees are aghast at the failures in these particular cases. As similar sorts of complaints have arisen at the (non-union) North Carolina plant, this sounds like the established processes aren't being followed.
I can't give a detailed description of the process, since I never worked an aircraft manufacturing program. I know that in my last 20 years with the company, we worked like heck to keep Boeing QA *out* of the programs....primarily to save costs, and reduce schedule impacts. We were working small satellite development, though, and got the customer to buy-off on our alternate QC approach.
I can't help but thinking of one of rumors I heard, just prior to retirement. This was making the rounds in the Engineering union, so apply salt as required.
Anyway, the story was, when Boeing bid for the KC-46 program, they priced the program using a very low number of senior engineers. Obviously, paying five year's salary to 200 Level 1 engineers is a heck of a lot cheaper than paying it to 200 Level 5s. I don't have the current salary scale, but a 2002 contract on my PC shows the minimum salary for a Level 1 was *half* that of a level 6. The highest-level engineers are actually paid executive-level salaries, with similar perks.
As the story goes, Boeing was going to rely on its first- and second-tier managers to provide the guidance traditionally provided by senior engineering leads. Many managers, of course, came up from the engineering ranks. However, many haven't... they work the minimum time as an engineer, and go into the more-lucrative management track. Also, while engineers are paid a nominal stipend on overtime, many managers aren't paid overtime. More cost savings, at the expense of burned-out managers.
What this meant, of course, is that the engineering workforce lacked experience. That, rather than being mentored and guided by men and women who'd been through these kinds of programs before, the engineers were basically on their own, with managers that were just as clueless. As the KC-46 program got into trouble, Boeing started scrambling to find experienced engineers to rescue it. But, of course, they were all working other, just-as-important programs by then. They tried to throw me into that mess about five years ago...someone at tanker had found out I was an aviation-knowledgeable engineer-pilot who could write. I managed to squirm out.
It's possible that engineering oversight of QA was a casualty of this process. It's possible, too that the SAME process was attempted with the machinists.
And here's the magical thing: Most government programs don't pay for the level of engineering experience. There's a flat rate, and Boeing gets paid that rate whether it's a 25-year veteran technical fellow or a guy who just graduated from engineering school last month. More profit.
And, I think profit is the key thing, here. Good QA is legendarily expensive. You save a buck, somewhere, by reducing QA and you reap a lot of benefits.
If you work at Boeing, you see a lot of yellowed Quality posters on the wall, and maybe twice a year you have some company-mandated Quality Assurance training. But every, SINGLE day, the company message is "Enhance shareholder value": In other words, cut cost, reduce schedule. And QA is anathema to both those factors.
Ron Wanttaja
